Within the extensive literature on international regionalism, the more limited academic work done on regional financial organizations (RFOs) tends to assume that, by pooling resources to address such common international economic issues as development funding and financial crises, RFOs contribute to economic stability in their parts of the global landscape. Although South America has led the pack in creating such RFOs, their effectiveness is limited by the asymmetry in economic heft of the continent's governments. Rather than weighing the significance of financial regionalism in South America from the point of view of the majority, we assess whether and how this phenomenon has contributed to Brazil's politico-economic rise to near-major-power standing on the world stage in the twenty-first century. Drawing on extensive interviews with Brazilian officials conducted in March 2013, we analyze three instances of South America's international public finance: development lending, crisis lending, and payment systems. Our findings suggest that self-generated unilateral and bilateral financial initiatives have brought Brasília far more significant economic and political results than have RFOs, whose various incarnations have yielded the continental giant few economic and only minor political gains.

Anomalous coronary arteries from the pulmonary artery are uncommon causes of heart failure in the adult population. This case demonstrates the unusual presentation in a patient with anomalous right coronary artery from the pulmonary artery and discusses the complex pathophysiology of this lesion and the role of guideline-directed medical therapy in the management of these patients.

Many practitioners of political science are currently questioning the bona fides of comparative politics as a valid academic subdiscipline in their trade. At the same time, in trying to perform comparative politics in the classroom over a period of five years, I have found the standard, multi-country comparative politics course to be increasingly unsatisfactory as a component of the political science curriculum. Many factors combine to make it extremely difficult to generate an adequate university learning experience from this kind of course:

1. Superficial learning is inherent in multicountry comparative courses. Because of the pressure to deal with at least three political systems within the confines of a single course, relatively little time is devoted to each country. Moreover the bibliographical material varies wildly from country to country in its quantity, quality, methodology, and content. It can only be a rare instructor who is really competent, let alone expert, in the politics of all the fields he is expected to treat in his course.

The SWEEPS (Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search) program was aimed at detecting planets around stars in the Galactic bulge, not only to determine their physical properties, but also to determine whether the properties of planets found in the solar neighborhood, such as their frequency and the metallicity dependence, also hold for the planets in the Galactic bulge. We used the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor 180,000 F, G, K, and M dwarfs in the Galactic bulge continuously for 7 days in order to look for transiting planets. We discovered 16 candidate transiting extrasolar planets with periods of 0.6 to 4.2 days, including a possible new class of ultra-short period planets (USPPs) with P < 1 day. The facts that (i) the coverage in the monitoring program is continuous, (ii) most of the stars are at a known distance (in the Galctic bulge), (iii) monitoring was carried out in 2 passbands, and (iv) the images have high spatial resolution, were crucial in minimizing and estimating the false positive rates. We estimate that at least 45% of the candidates are genuine planets. Radial velocity observations of the two brightest host stars further support the planetary nature of the transiting companions. These results suggest that the planet frequency in the Galactic bulge is similar to that in the solar neighborhood. They also suggest that higher metallicity favors planet formation even in the Galactic bulge. The USPPs occur only around low-mass stars which may suggest that close-in planets around higher-mass stars are irradiately evaporated, or that planets are able to migrate to and survive in close-in orbits only around such old and low-mass stars.